Monthly Archives: August 2015

Hola Hart Beat. Thanks again to this week’s new Discover Feature in Spotify I found another song that you might like to listen to. At least I’m enjoying it over here on this slow moving Tuesday. This song by Cate Le Bon came out in 2013 with the release of her studio album Mug Museum. Clearly I was not on the ball because I’m only now hearing this song, “Are you with me now?”, for the first time. What do you think, Hart Beat? You like? Had you heard of Cate Le Bon before?

Hola Hart Beat! Annnnnd, happy Monday. Or at least, hey, it’s Monday, what can we do about it. Over the weekend Pedro and I ate like the kings of Westeros and decided to do somethings that have been on our bucket lists this summer.

For me, one of those things has been to spend a day in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I don’t know Red Hook at all but it’s one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that I’ve been wanting to check out. For those of you not familiar with the neighborhood, it’s a East River adjacent little nook of a neighborhood pretty isolated from the rest of the borough. The subway doesn’t run there so you’re dependent on bike or bus to get in and out of the area. Since I have my trusty SAAB in the city we drove over in the morning and well, it was a success Hart Beat.

First thing we did because we are human and need energy, was stop by Baked to grab some coffee and a treat. The shop is super cute and sells the BEST cookies. I can attest since I got the “breakfast” cookie in an attempt to both please my stomach and my health concerns. After hanging out in, what Pedro called, the yuppies coffee shop I could have found, we ventured forth to the rest of the neighborhood.

There isn’t a ton to do in Red Hook in terms of attractions but there are a dozen or so adorable little stores, a handful of great bars and some breathtaking piers to walk out onto. From the pier you can see all of lower Manhattan and look out over lady liberty. You can check out in my pictures below some of the places we checked out.

After walking around in the heat for what felt like EONS we checked out the Brooklyn Crab to grab some Coronas and seafood before we trekked back to Bay Ridge and the sanctuary that is AC. It was a successful day and if you’re coming into Brooklyn this summer and looking for something to do, I couldn’t recommend it more.

P.S. If you want to check out the Superga shoes I’m wearing in the top shot, you can see them here!

Heyyyyy, Hart Beat. Another week and another Friday (gracias a dios). What are you doing this weekend? Pedro and I are going to spend the day in Red Hook on Sunday and I’m super excited. It’s a great neighborhood and apparently there’s a taco place that we have been wanting to try. Until Monday here are five articles that I loved reading this week. Hope you like them too, Hart Beat!

Hey Hart Beat. I’m not sure about you but today is both a stressful and blah day at work. Thursday’s are rough, the weekend is so close but still, a solid amount of time away. I was surfing through Spotify to find a playlist since my usual WNYC is a little too distracting today and I found a great playlist that I thought you might like.

It’s called “Essential Indie” and while some of the artists are questionably still indie (The Strokes? they’re not mainstream yet?), almost all of the songs are amazing. When each one plays I have that moment of, oh yea! I love this song! Hope you enjoy it too, Hart Beat.

I feel like I’m late to the game, Hart Beat. During my trip to Cape Cod last week I visited my first Kiehl’s store and now, I’m obsessed. I’m not entirely sure why I never checked Kiehl’s out before this trip but between the simple packaging, the branding, the beautiful stores and the fact that these are hair products, it seems like the brand is completely up my alley. It wasn’t until I was waiting for breakfast in Provincetown and looked across the street to see an adorable Kiehl’s store sitting right in front of me, that I finally considered the products.

I talked to the associates at Kiehl’s in Provincetown who was suuuuuuper helpful and picked out some new shampoo and conditioner. They’re are tons of kinds on the site so you can pick exactly what you need for your kind of hair. The kind that I chose, and I guess is good for everyone (yes, maybe? idk) is the Amino Acid Collection. Why do I love it? Because my hair is super smooth PLUS it smells like coconut. I’m in heaven.

If you have other Kiehl’s recommendations let me know. I am not a proud (late) rider on the official bus.

Morning, Hart Beat! For a while now, Pedro and I have been talking about life in Brooklyn and what that means for well, everything. Jobs, friends, fun, culture are all so close by but, Pedro has been talking a lot about how he’s always dreamed of living somewhere else. And that place is Portland, Oregon!**

I’m not sure where Pedro’s original obsession with the west coast city came from (Nike’s office’s are there, maybe that’s it?) but over the past few months we’ve been talking about the city so much that I was finally like, ya know what, let’s go there ourselves and see what we think. So we are!

My company gives all employees something called “Summer Week,” one week off around Labor Day, so Pedro and I are jetting off to the west coast to check out this hipster mecca. Our only experience with the west coast comes from my once upon a time “move” to San Francisco and Pedro’s one time trip to Seattle during his professional gaming days. We are both super excited.

It’s been a long while since Portland was hailed as “the place to be” and between Portlandia and the amazing instagram photos I’ve been obsessing over, I’m afraid that everyone might be right. For Pedro, Portland has a pretty big sneaker community thanks to both Nike and CSS having their home offices there and hypebeast not having hit the small city. For me, it seems like an amazing place to actually ride my bike around as well as a great place to finally open my dream store.

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. PEDRO AND I ARE NOT MOVING. We’re just taking a trip out to Portland… Oregon…. to see how we like it. I would love any recommendations of places to check out. A few of my friends from work have sent over amazing lists and we would love to keep them coming. The more places to check out the better.

** Yes it’s necessary to distinguish. Everyone and their mother assume Portland, Maine when I say just “Portland” and Pedro has some pretty strong opinions about that. I USED TO LIVE IN MAINE, OKAY PEDRO?? jkjk, I love you.

Hi Hart Beat. Some of you might have seen this but The New York Times is pulling this great series called “Summer Love” that I thought you might like to see. The paper is requesting couples to submit summer love stories that they have experienced in New York, for however long, or short amount of time. Not to overdo this but, I love this idea.

So far the Times has pulled together about a dozen features on couples of all kinds. I’ve had the best time reading through them and thinking about all the ways to fall in (and sometimes out) in this city. As much as I love so many cities in the world (Madrid, Boston, Amsterdam, Portland), New York really has the most romantic feeling about it. I think it has something to do with the vastness and the sheer number of possibilities. On any given day you could run into your soulmate, the most romantic bar you’ve ever seen or into a heart-wrenching public breakup on the C train.

This video here is one of my favorite stories from the series. Summer = roller coasters and love = a roller coaster (see what I did there?). I’ve been thinking about submitting Pedro and my story to the paper. What do you think, Hart Beat? Have you found love in New York before?

Morning, Hart Beat. Have I mentioned lately that I work for Food52? I know what you’re saying to yourselves, of course you have Hannah! We get it, you work for a beautiful place and eat delicious food. I don’t mention this very often here on Hart Beat because when I first started this here blog, one of my founding mission statements (of sorts?) was that Hart Beat would NEVER become a food blog. (Please excuse this post).

I’m not sure why I had such a strong reaction to this but I did and honestly, I still do. I love food and I love cooking but I am by no means someone to give recipe recommendations nor do I particularly like reading recipes in a blog sense. And why would I write things that I wouldn’t even want to read? In the same vain as this Instacrush profile was, today’s post inches close to the line of Hart Beat’s food blog anti-mission statement. This morning I want to tell you about a new blog that I’ve started reading and why you should too.

Little Sister Kitchen was created by a friend of mine from High School and has been stealing my heart as of late. Grace graduated from our high school, went to school in Iowa and now lives in Boston working for an ecommerce site. I heard through the grapevine of social media that Grace started a cooking blog and since I’m now engulfed in the food world, I knew I had to check it out. Oh Hart Beat, thank god that I did.

Grace takes the most beautiful photos and has the most down to earth writing style that I’ve read in a while. In her posts not only does she give the recipe and a detailed description of the cooking process but, she also gives a little backstory to the history of the recipe. Here’s a little excerpt from her most recent post:

It’s easy to get down on yourself when you’re 24. You have a good job and a desk with a view, a big kitchen with two windows that let in the morning breeze, and are by all accounts the luckiest girl in the world. And yet, there’s this nagging sensation that runs deep—that you aren’t where you need to be yet.

I never actually had a something I wanted to ‘be when I grew up.’ I always knew I was passionate, but after my short-lived dreams of being an opera singer (sorry, siblings, for stationing myself in the echo-y stairwell for hours at a time, belting out ballads where they sounded the loudest) my dreams became less specific. In college, it was easy to indulge in the challenges of my classes, analyzing paintings by and working laboriously through esoteric texts. But I had this fear of not knowing what I’d be good at.

Well said, Grace, well said. Figuring out what your supposed to do, or even want to do, in your early twenties is all but impossible. It’s nice to see another friend going through the similar struggles that I know only so well. Lucky for both you and me, Hart Beat, Grace has found her passion in Little Sister Kitchen and now we get to follow along for the ride.

Oh Hart Beat. Let’s admit it, Fall is coming and it’s coming fast. I hate to think about this, especially since all I want to do is move to a tropical beach after my vacation last week. The only good thing about fall is the fashion that comes with it. WHO DOESN’T LIKE LAYERING?? Right? One of the layering things I’m crazy about are really more of a footwear issue. Clogs! And more specifically, a pair of Nina Z. clogs.

I’ve wanted a pair of these boys so badly that one time I was driving with Pedro and saw a girl biking with them on. I screamed out “NINA Z” and he told me later he was worried I would run over the girl to walk away with the shoes. I’m not there yet, Pedro.

They’re designed by Nina herself who has a studio upstate and sells on the weekends at the Brooklyn Flea. All the clogs are handmade in Sweden so we can all get that northern European dream fashion look that we’ve been wishing for (I know you have too, Hart Beat.) Nina Z. is all over Brooklyn and the girls over at Local Creative highlighted them this summer with this adorable Instagram video you can watch here. Um.. as if I didn’t want a pair enough.

Hi Hart Beat! Did ya miss me? I for sure missed you and as I write this Sunday night (to be published bright and early Monday morning) I feel a little drunk while writing this, I guess that’s what taking a solid week from the computer will do to you. In this week off of work, off of the blog and out of Brooklyn, I got some serious R&R in with plenty of beach time, reading time, sleeping time and family time.

Every summer of my life prior to this one, I have spent time in August with my mom’s family on a small island off the coast of Maine. The island is tiny (only about four miles round) and is one of those summer communities where the 100 cottages are only open for the summer months with no cars, restaurants or grocery stores on the island at all. This summer we got news that my cousins on my dad’s side of the family were coming east with family that I haven’t seen in years so my mom, dad and I decided to take a break from Maine and spend a week on the cape with the rest of the visiting family. SUCH A GOOD DECISION, HART BEAT.

I had only been to the cape twice before this week long trip. Once when I was 14 and spent Thanksgiving with friends of my parents on their beachside house (angsty Hannah loved walking the cold beach listening to the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack) and another time when I was 15 and spent about a week biking Cape Code with a summer camp group. Since both of these experiences were somewhat bizarre I had a weird sense of the cape and was so happy to have a solid week to get to know the area as a (somewhat) adult.

My final review? I love Maine but, MAN, Cape Cod is the bomb! There’s so much to do! There are oceanside beaches! bayside beaches! ponds! rivers! bike trails!! It was so great to have so many spaces to explore and still feel like I didn’t get a grasp on everything there was that I could have done.

My mom, dad and I rented a tiny little cabin on the coast of an inlet in Eastham. It was the perfect size for the three of us (missing Pedro every minute 😭) and we were able to cook (see above’s lobster dinner), nap and outdoor shower (pic below) to our hearts content. One of the things that was great about the cape was that my dad and I could bike around and explore. My dad has a hard time walking and riding a bike is one of the only ways he can get around. Having a bike path going through ever village was amazing. Extra points for Cape Cod. I’m not going to go into crazy detail here about the beaches we went to and the crazy good ice cream we ate but here are some photos that I took throughout the week. I hope you like them Hart Beat and I will see you back here soon with your regularly scheduled romantic postings and such.

Post navigation

About

Hi! It looks like you’ve found your way through the internet to Hannah Hart Beat, your Post-Brooklyn Lifestyle Blog. I’m Hannah, nice to internet meet you. I’m a Spanish Literature major turned digital marketer living a post-Brooklyn life and writing to you about music, fashion and everything else that I love.